Combatting Writer’s Block With Revision

I’ve never been a fan of rewriting in the middle of writing, because the process starts to take over my life, I stop writing writing, and I start obsessing over little nitpicky details and mistakes that I made early on. That being said, one of the things I’ve been using to combat writer’s block and get myself excited about telling the story again (even though that part I’m on right now is really hard for me to write) is going back and reading some of the earlier chapters. So I’ve been doing a little bit of revising lately while I’ve been struggling with Chapter 21.

Which is good, because some things that I thought were in the story, I had told instead of shown. There were some little scenes where I knew what happened, but instead of showing the scene, I said ‘this happened’ and left it for the re-write. Mostly this happened in parts where I didn’t have a handle on a character that was in the scene, or hadn’t quite researched how X or Y should look and I didn’t want to write an inaccurate description. Having characters inaccurately interpret things is different than having them inaccurately describe them, but that is a topic for another day.

Anyway, my point is this: I think that reading and adding some of those fun little scenes I sort of glossed over has really helped me combat writer’s block. And maybe most of these scenes are unnecessary fluff and they’re going to go into a deleted scenes file on the re-write, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. The point is, I’m excited about writing again, and that’s really what my hangup was.